All posts tagged ‘ePawn’

Back in December I wrote about the ePawn Arena, a digital screen with some very nifty features that will allow for some pretty cool board game possibilities. Over the weekend I came across this video the team posted, showing a couple of miniature bots being controlled by the Arena.

When I talked to them in December, they described a concept like this: imagine having a chess app on your iPhone, and hooking it up to your Arena board with little bot chess pieces. You physically move a chess piece on the board, and the Arena sends that move to your iPhone chess app. Your friend somewhere else in the world has their own iPhone/Arena set up, and when you make your move, the corresponding chess piece on their board moves along automatically to the correct place. At the time, I figured that was still a long ways off — after all, the Arena isn’t even available yet and it’ll be a while before developers really start to create apps that can use it. So it’s pretty cool to see this proof-of-concept video, and I’m excited to see what else they’ve got in store.

Of course, the chess scenario is hardly the most exciting use of the Arena, and probably not really necessary. You could just as easily (or more easily) play chess on a screen, without the pieces. But imagine running a D&D campaign remotely, and being able to move a monster around on a board, your players watching as it rounds the corner and waiting to see who it’s going to attack. Granted, the robots will need to get much smaller, and I can’t imagine they’ll be so cheap that you can buy a ton of them for a while … but if you’re a game developer you should start dreaming now. When the Arena becomes available (planned release is the second half of this year), I want to have some amazing games to play on it!

As you can tell from reading my posts, I’m more of a board gamer than a video gamer. Don’t get me wrong; I really do enjoy playing video games (and you can’t take my iPad from me), but I still prefer sitting around a table with a bunch of people and moving physical bits around. (As Daniel Solis put it, “My favorite game console is a table and chairs.”) That said, I also love the ability to play games like Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Ascension against opponents from not just around the country but around the world.

Nearly two years ago I wrote about some experiments to simulate OLED screens in board game tiles, and then at the beginning of this year I reflected some more on the future of board games taking into consideration technologies like the iPad and the Microsoft Surface table. I think that as board game companies have been finding ways to make the transition to digital games, it’s been interesting to see what clicks and what doesn’t — what feels like playing a board game. It’s great when the digital version is able to track things that are cumbersome to manage physically, but there’s also a tradeoff when you lose the physicality of the bits and pieces. And even though the iPad’s larger screen certainly feels closer to playing a board game than a tiny smartphone screen, you’re rarely going to have four people crowded around an iPad on the table, playing a board game together.

Those are, as it turns out, the same issues that inspired Christophe Duteil and Valentin Lefevre to form ePawn and create a new digital game peripheral, the ePawn Arena. The Paris-based ePawn was formed last fall for the purpose of developing the Arena, which is a display screen that incorporates real-time motion-tracking technology, allowing you to move physical pawns and pieces on the surface of a screen as part of a digital game.

Here’s a little teaser video showing some of the Arena’s capabilities: